ORGANIZATIONAL LAB
Why Does It Take So Long for New Employees to Become Effective?
A working session for founders and leaders who want to understand what slow onboarding may be revealing about their organization.
Tuesday, August 25 · 12–2 PM Eastern (UTC−4) · Live online · Limited to 6 organizations · $295 per organization
Your new employee is capable. So why is it taking months for them to really get up to speed?
Perhaps they understand the work, but still need help navigating the organization.
They don’t always know where to find what they need.
They’re unsure which decisions they can make themselves.
They need context that isn’t written down anywhere.
Or they keep discovering that the way work happens in practice is different from the way it’s supposed to happen on paper.
The natural response is to improve onboarding.
And perhaps that’s exactly what’s needed.
But slow onboarding can also reveal something about the organization itself.
What if the difficulty a new employee experiences is showing you something your existing team has learned not to notice?
What we’ll explore
Rather than beginning with an onboarding framework, we’ll begin with what is actually happening inside the organizations in the room.
We’ll look at questions such as:
• Where are new employees actually getting stuck?
• What knowledge or context takes longest to acquire?
• Where does that knowledge currently live?
• Are roles and decision-making authority clear?
• What have experienced employees learned to navigate that newcomers cannot yet see?
• Which difficulties belong to onboarding — and which may point to a larger organizational challenge?
Not every question will apply to every organization.
That’s intentional.
The purpose of the lab isn’t to fit your organization into a predetermined model. It’s to understand your particular situation more clearly.
This isn’t a webinar.
There won’t be a two-hour presentation followed by ten minutes for questions.
An Organizational Lab is a participatory working session built around a specific challenge that real organizations are facing.
You’ll bring what you’re seeing inside your organization.
I’ll bring questions, organizational and systems thinking, and facilitated inquiry.
Other participants will bring perspectives from organizations facing variations of the same challenge.
Together, we’ll look for patterns, differences, assumptions worth questioning, and possible experiments to take back into your organization.
The goal isn’t to leave with a generic onboarding framework.
It’s to leave seeing your own organization — and the problem you’re trying to solve — more clearly.
Facilitated by Michael Nicholas
I’m an Organizational Strategist working with founder-led organizations as increasing complexity begins to change what the organization needs from its people, its ways of working, and its founder.
My approach draws on systems thinking, organizational development, knowledge management, technology, and years of experience building and leading within complex systems.
Before beginning this work, I spent more than four years building Troo, an ethical social media startup. I recruited approximately 40 people who contributed to the company over its lifetime, led a distributed team, and built many of the organizational processes we needed from the ground up.
Before Troo, I worked as a software engineer, designer, educator, and composer. I hold a Ph.D. in Music Composition from UC Berkeley.
That unconventional path has given me a particular way of approaching organizational problems: I don’t begin by assuming I know what the solution is.
I listen, ask questions, look for relationships between what different people are seeing, and work to understand how the organization actually functions before deciding what might need to change.
That’s the approach I’ll bring to this lab.
This lab is for you if…
You’re a founder or organizational leader currently dealing with some version of this problem.
Perhaps new employees take longer than you’d expect to become independent.
Perhaps too much knowledge still lives in particular people’s heads.
Perhaps your organization has grown, but the way people learn how things work hasn’t evolved with it.
Or perhaps you simply sense that what looks like an onboarding problem may be connected to something larger.
You don’t need to have diagnosed the problem before you arrive. That’s part of what the lab is for.
What happens in the lab
We’ll begin with the situations participants bring into the room.
We’ll examine where new employees are getting stuck and what those difficulties may be telling us.
As patterns emerge, we’ll look beneath the apparent onboarding problem — at knowledge, context, roles, decisions, communication, capability, or whatever else the situations reveal.
Then we’ll consider what each organization might investigate or try next.
Because the lab is limited to six organizations, there will be time to work with the actual circumstances each organization brings rather than speaking about onboarding only in the abstract.
Each registration includes up to two people from the same organization, so you may attend on your own or bring a colleague whose perspective would be valuable to the conversation.
Details
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
12:00–2:00 PM Eastern (UTC−4)
Live online via Proton Meet
Limited to 6 organizations
$295 per organization
Reserve Your Place
Complete the form below to register your organization for the lab.